Red Squirrel Reflections Dave Hoover explores the psychology of software development

Back in early 2002 I played around with web services a bit. Since Perl was my strongest language at that point, I focused on the SOAP::Lite module. True to Perl culture, SOAP::Lite made simple things simple. I could write both clients and servers in about five lines of code. This ease-of-use helped me discover ways to use web services at work and at play.

After taking a new position later that year and immersing myself in Java, J2EE and ATG, my interest in web services faded.

This weekend, I am preparing myself for an interview on Monday with some folks who are up to their necks in web services. They use Glue and Fabric from WebMethods. So I've been playing with Glue today, and I am impressed...

I never would have predicted that a Java toolkit could be as concise as a Perl toolkit, but it's true. Here is a Glue web service:

Posted by Dave [Link]

I was pondering the similarities between families and software development teams on the train this morning. For me, it is a comparison I have made many times: I was educated and trained to help families, while I spend most of my time working on software development teams. But this morning a new idea popped into my head. What if I compared families with larger systems, like entire corporations? Using the metaphor in this way illuminates something different...

If the company is the family, then a team could be seen as a single entity: a child, a parent, an uncle, a dog. Looking at teams as children of a larger system, it is painfully obvious why changing the process within a team is next to impossible when that team continues to live daily within the dynamics of the larger system.

It is family therapy 101: lasting change comes from systemic change. You can give a troubled child the best treatment available, but when you plunk that child back into his family system, the troubles will inevitably return.

Posted by Dave [Link]

One of the companies I am interested in working for asked me to code an unbeatable tic tac toe game. I chose to code it in Java and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I got a little carried away and developed a Swing GUI on top of the text UI they had required. It gave me an excuse to play with Threads again. I really like Threads. And the nice thing about Swing is that I can add my main JPanel to a JApplet and wham-o ... the game is available on the web ... in one line of code.

Once I was finished with the game, I started Googling unbeatable tic tac toe. Looking at the source code for some other tic tac toe games, I am grateful that I had the power of object-oriented design and test driven development at my disposal ... they saved me from having to think about too many things at once.

Posted by Dave [Link]

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